Event: WEDS TALK: Was Pharaoh Egypt?: Middle Kingdom Kingship in Context

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the focus of Egyptological scholarship has slowly moved away from narratives focused solely on royal monuments and texts to interrogate how kings and kingship fit into broader ancient Egyptian society. My current book project seeks to better understand where, when, why, and how non-royal Egyptians in specifically the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2030 - 1650 BCE) engaged with kingship.

In this talk, I will go over my initial motivation for working on this topic and the ways in which my thinking has evolved, shifting from focusing on binary absence vs. presence of kingship in non-royal lives to more carefully considering the ways in which kingship was engaged with by those outside of the royal court. Rather than impose strict categorizations, my approach instead highlights the variability of engagement with kingship in the non-royal sphere, including for instance encounters hinging on the durability of architecture or the experience of occasion.

BIO: Luiza Osorio G Silva is Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P) in Giza, Egypt. Her research interests include ancient Egyptian kingship, monumentality, and the audiences and contexts for art and architecture.